Joseph Anton: A Memoir (61 page)

The Scandinavian press was up in arms about the Nygaard shooting. The Norwegian publishers’ association demanded to know what the Norwegian government’s response to Iran would be. And a former Iranian ambassador who had defected to the opposition group Mujahideen-e Khalq, or PMOI (“People’s Mujahideen of Iran”), announced that he had told the Norwegian police four months earlier that a hit was being planned against William.

The Nordic governments were angry, but the shooting had frightened people. The Dutch Ministry of Culture had been planning to invite him to Amsterdam but now it was backing away, and so was Royal Dutch Airlines. The Council of Europe, which had agreed to a meeting months earlier, canceled it. Gabi Gleichmann, who was leading the “Rushdie campaign” in Sweden—though he and Carmel Bedford were constantly at odds—had been given police protection. In Britain, the
ad hominem
attacks continued. An article in the
Evening Standard
called him “conceited” and “mad,” derided him for wanting so much attention, and sneered that he wasn’t worth it because he had conducted himself so poorly. London’s LBC radio station was running a poll to ask the British public “if we should support Rushdie anymore,” and in
The Telegraph
there was an interview with Marianne Wiggins in which her ex-husband was called “doleful, foolish, cowardly, vain, farcical, and morally ambiguous.” Clive Bradley at the British Publishers Association said that Trevor Glover at Penguin UK was blocking a statement about William. He called Glover, who at first pretended he hadn’t done it, thought it was “just a casual conversation,” but, “Gosh, we are all a bit more nervous now and should we make a public noise?” and then finally agreed to call Bradley to lift the Penguin veto.

He received a threatening letter, the first for a long while, warning him that his “time was drawing near,” because “Allah saw all things.” The letter was signed by D. Ali of the “Manchester Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Racist League.” Their members were watching all the airports, he said, and they had people in all neighborhoods—“Liverpool, Bradford, Hampstead, Kensington”—and as the winter darkness was “better for them to do their work,” he would soon be “back in Iran.”

There was an evening at Isabel Fonseca’s apartment with Martin Amis, James Fenton, and Darryl Pinckney, and Martin depressed him by telling him that George Steiner believed he had “set out to make a lot of trouble,” and Martin’s father, Kingsley Amis, had said that “if you set out to make trouble you shouldn’t complain when you get it,” and Al Alvarez had said that he had “done it because he wanted to be the most famous writer in the world.” And to Germaine Greer he was a “megalomaniac” and John le Carré had called him a “twerp” and Martin’s ex-stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard and Sybille Bedford thought he had “done it to make money.” His friends were ridiculing these assertions but by the end of the evening he felt very upset and only Elizabeth’s love brought him back. Maybe they should marry, he wrote in his journal. Who could love him better, be braver, sweeter-natured, or give more of herself? She had committed herself to him, and deserved no less in return. At home, celebrating their first year at 9 Bishops’ Avenue, they had a loving evening and he felt better.

In his Beckettian moods, hunched over in his wooden study, he was a man lost in a mocking void: both Didi and Gogo, playing games against despair. No, he was their antithesis; they hoped for Godot, whereas he was waiting for what he hoped would never come. Almost every day there were moments when he allowed his shoulders to slump, then pushed them back again. He ate too much, gave up smoking, wheezed, quarreled with the empty air, rubbing his fists against his temples, and always thinking, thinking like a fire, as if thinking could burn away his ills. Almost every day was like this: a battle against hopelessness, often lost, but never lost forever. “Inside us,” José Saramago had written, “there is something that has no name. That something is what we are.” The something that had no name within him always
came to his rescue in the end. He clenched his teeth, shook his head to clear his thoughts, and ordered himself to get on with it.

William Nygaard took his first steps. Halfdan Freihow said that William had decided to move house because of the “danger of the bushes,” which would prevent him “taking a late-night piss in the garden.” They were finding him a high-security apartment building to live in. The hit man had not been found. William had “nowhere to aim his anger.” But he was getting better. The novel’s Danish publisher, Johannes Riis, said that things were calm in Denmark, and he had “the advantage of a calm wife.” He thought of the danger as comparable to crossing the road, he said, and his author, hearing this, was again humbled in the presence of real courage. “I am furious,” Johannes added, “that such an obscenity should continue to be part of the frame in which we live.”

At the first meeting of the so-called “International Parliament of Writers” in Strasbourg he worried about the name, because they were unelected, but the French shrugged and said that in France
un parlement
was just a place where people talked. He insisted that the statement they were drafting against Islamist terror should include references to Tahar Djaout, Farag Fouda, Aziz Nesin, Ugur Mumcu and the newly embattled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen as well as himself. Susan Sontag swept in, embraced him, and spoke passionately in fluent French, calling him
un grand écrivain
who represented the crucial secularized culture the Muslim extremists wished to suppress. Strasbourg mayor Catherine Trautmann wanted to give him the freedom of the city. Catherine Lalumière of the Council of Europe promised that the council would take up his cause. That evening there was a party for the visiting writers and he was accosted by a crazily passionate Iranian woman, “Hélène Kafi,” who rebuked him for not making common cause with the Mujahideen-e Khalq. “I am not being aggressive, Salman Rushdie, but
je suis un peu deçu de vous
, you should know who your real friends are.” The next day she claimed in the media that she, and through her the PMOI, had joined the French “Rushdie committee” and the grenades that had been thrown at the French embassy and
Air France offices in Tehran were because of that. (In fact they were because of France’s decision to give asylum to the PMOI leader Maryam Rajavi, and unrelated to the “Rushdie Affair.”)

He sat on a small red sofa with Toni Morrison, who had just won the Nobel Prize, and Sontag, who shouted, “My God, I’m sitting between the two most famous writers in the world!”—whereupon both he and Toni began assuring her that her day in Stockholm would surely come very soon. Susan asked him what he was writing. She had put her finger on the thing that was worrying him most. To lead the campaign against the
fatwa
he had had almost to stop being a working writer. This was the flattening effect of becoming involved in politics. His thoughts had been full of airlines and ministers and feta cheese and had turned away from the sweet recesses of the mind where fiction lurked. His novel had stalled. Was this campaign, which people told him was working so well, actually a way of diminishing himself in the world’s eyes as well as his own? Was he actually helping to turn himself into nothing more than the flattened, two-dimensional caricature at the heart of the “Rushdie Affair” and abdicating his claim to art? He had gone from
Salman
to
Rushdie
to
Joseph Anton
and now, perhaps, he was making a nobody of himself. He was a lobbyist lobbying for an empty space that no longer contained a man.

He told Susan, “I’ve sworn an oath that next year I’ll stay home and write.”

To reach the summit—a meeting with a president—it was necessary to approach him from many directions at once. The approach to Mount Clinton had been made by him personally, by the Rushdie defense committee and Article 19, by the British ambassador in Washington on behalf of the British government, by PEN American Center. Aryeh Neier of Human Rights Watch, Nick Veliotes of the Association of American Publishers and Scott Armstrong of the Freedom Forum were among those pushing for the meeting. In addition, Christopher Hitchens had been urging his White House contacts to make it happen. Christopher was not an admirer of Bill Clinton, but he was on friendly terms with the president’s close adviser George Stephanopoulos,
and spoke to him several times. It seemed that Clinton’s people were divided between those who were telling him the
fatwa
was not America’s affair and those, like Stephanopoulos, who wanted him to do the right thing.

Two days after his return to London the “green light from Washington” came through. At first Nick Veliotes was told that the president would not be at the meeting. It would be with the national security adviser, Anthony Lake, with Vice President Gore “dropping in.” At the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, his contact person Larry Robinson confirmed that it would be a meeting with Lake and Gore. He would be given “portal to portal protection,” that was to say, from the aircraft to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where he was to be honored—Alan Lightman, author of
Einstein’s Dreams
, who taught at MIT, had called him to make the offer of an honorary professorship), from MIT to D.C., and in D.C. until he left the country again. Two days later Frances was told that Gore would be in the Far East and Lake might be unavailable so the meeting would be with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Lake’s “number two.” The meeting with Warren Christopher would be in the Treaty Room with photographers. He spoke to Christopher Hitchens, who feared this was a case of Clinton “funking it.” That evening the deal changed again. The meeting would be with Anthony Lake and Warren Christopher and the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, John Shattuck. The president was “not confirmed.” It would be the day before Thanksgiving, and the president had a great deal to do. He had to pardon a turkey. He might not have time to help out a novelist as well.

At JFK there were eight cars waiting instead of the lower-key three he had been promised. The officer in charge, Jim Tandy, was a big improvement on Lieutenant Bob, gently spoken and helpful, a tall, thin, mustachioed man with a wide-eyed, serious face. He was taken first to Andrew’s apartment, where the police were making a big deal out of his arrival, even preventing the other residents of the building from using the elevators. That would be popular, he thought. He was supposed to be a Pakistani diplomat called Dr. Ren, but nobody was being fooled.

Inside Andrew’s apartment there were friends to greet him. Norman Mailer wished him luck, and Norris Mailer said, “If you see Bill, tell him I said hello.” As a young woman she had worked on Clinton’s campaign when he was running for governor of Arkansas. “I got to know him very well,” she said. Okay, he told Norris politely, I’ll mention it. “No,” she said, putting her elegant hand on his arm like Margaret Thatcher at her most touchy-feely. “You don’t understand. I mean I got to know him
very well
.” Oh. Right. Yes, Norris. In that case I’ll
definitely
give him your best.

He met Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, who were very affectionate; it was the beginning of what would become one of his closest friendships. Don DeLillo was there too. He was working on a “huge and sprawling book,” he said. It would be called
Underworld
. “I know something about underworlds,” he replied. Paul and Don wanted to produce a leaflet with a text about the
fatwa
that would be inserted into every book sold in America on February 14, 1994, but they had been told it would cost over $20,000 to produce and that was unrealistic. Peter Carey arrived and said with his usual dry comedy, “Hello, Salman, you look like shit.” Susan Sontag, who had agreed to be his “beard” at MIT, was looking forward to their little plot. David Rieff was full of sadness about Bosnia. Annie Leibovitz talked a little about her Bosnia photographs, but seemed oddly reluctant to push herself forward in Susan’s presence. Sonny and Gita Mehta arrived and Gita looked ill and drained. They said she was fine now, recovering from the cancer, and he hoped they were telling the truth. And suddenly Andrew said, “Oh my God, we’ve forgotten to invite Edward Said.” That was very bad. Edward would certainly mind.

Elizabeth and he slept at Andrew’s place and awoke to find a line of black limos parked in the street, as well as a large, unsubtle blue van labeled
BOMB SQUAD
. Then came the road trip to Concord, Massachusetts, where they would be the guests of Alan and Jean Lightman. Alan took them for a walk around Walden Pond and when they came to the remains of Thoreau’s hut he said to Alan that if he ever wrote up this trip he would call it “From a Log Cabin to the White House.” The hut was disappointingly close to the town, and Thoreau could easily have strolled in for a beer if he wanted one. It wasn’t exactly a wilderness retreat.

The next morning he was driven to a Boston hotel and Jean Lightman took Elizabeth off to see the city. Andrew and he worked the phones to see what progress had been or could be made. It became obvious that Frances and Carmel were at odds with Scott Armstrong, though Christopher Hitchens spoke up for him. Within the White House, Hitch added, Stephanopoulos and Shattuck were on his side and working on the president, but there was nothing definite to report. A U.S. official, Tom Robertson called to say that the meeting had been pushed back half an hour, from 11:30
A.M.
to noon. What did this mean? Did it mean anything? Scott and Hitch said later that the change happened right after George Stephanopoulos and others went to see the president’s scheduling person … so … maybe. Fingers crossed.

In the afternoon he went with Andrew Wylie to see Andrew’s childhood home. The new owner, a fiftysomething lady with a big smile called Nancy, looked at the motorcade and said, “Who are all those
people
outside?” Then she said “Oh,” and asked him if he was who he looked like. At first he said, “No, unfortunately,” and she replied, “You mean ‘fortunately.’ The poor man doesn’t have a very nice life, does he?” But she had all his books, so he owned up, and she was thrilled and wanted them signed. The house evoked many memories for Andrew because much of it, even the wallpaper upstairs, was unchanged from thirty years ago, and the letters
AW
were still scratched into the wood of the bookcases in the library, and on the edge of a door the three-foot height of the young Andy Wylie was still marked and named.